Major HP, Microsoft, and SAP Software Moves

Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced it was acquiring Tower Software, an Australian document and records management company, while SAP AG declared how it was planning to sort out some of its overlapping BI products. In addition, Microsoft Corp. won a battle in the document format standards arena.

Focal Points:

• HP announced it was purchasing Tower Software, a privately-held Australian enterprise content management software company in an all cash deal. The company, based in Canberra, Australia, has 240 employees globally and has been in business since 1985. The company's Tower Trim Context software is a widely used electronic discovery and compliance suite, and is already integrated with HP's Integrated Archive Platform to provide customers with record identification and classification capabilities. Advantages of the software are that it works seamlessly with Microsoft's SharePoint collaboration software and provides structure to unstructured data, is Web-enabled and searchable. According to HP officials, this will enable them to be well positioned to address the e-discovery market which is growing greater than 20 percent per year.
• SAP's acquisitions created significant overlap, especially in performance management tools. Those deals included SAP's purchase of Pilot Software and OutlookSoft, and Business Objects' acquisitions of ALG, SRC and Cartesis. SAP has decided on how they will sort much of this out. Those products not being carried forward will get security patches, bug fixes and limited support over the next three years. For financial planning, SAP has decided to keep developing the product from OutlookSoft, which became SAP Business Planning and Consolidation (SAP-BPC). That means customers using Business Objects' SRC software will be encouraged to migrate to SAP-BPC. For profitability and cost management, SAP will develop the ALG software, which Business Objects had renamed Activity Analysis. The picture for financial consolidation is a little more complicated. SAP has chosen Business Objects' Cartesis software as the premium consolidation engine. However, customers that want a unified planning and consolidation tool will be offered SAP-BPC (the former OutlookSoft product), which will retain its "Excel-like interface." An SAP spokesman described Cartesis as "the Cadillac product" for doing complex, global consolidation work involving numerous regulatory requirements. SAP will release some enhancements this year for its own SEM Business Consolidation System, the spokesman said, but customers will be advised to migrate over time to the Cartesis software. For strategy management, including dashboards and scorecards, SAP will retain the product it bought from Pilot Software, which it calls SAP Strategy Management. That implies new development will end soon on the former Business Objects' performance management product. SAP still has to deal with overlap between Crystal Reports, Web Intelligence, Dashboard Builder, Voyager and other products on the Business Objects side, and Visual Analyzer and BEx BI from SAP.
• Microsoft finally won a battle to have one of its key document formats adopted as a global standard, improving its chances of winning government contracts and dealing a blow to supporters of a rival format. The OpenDoc Society, which had argued Microsoft's Office Open XML (OOXML) format was unripe for ratification by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), published the results showing Microsoft's win on its Web site. Supporters of rival Open Document Format (ODF) were disappointed in the shift in votes that made this possible. Open XML joins the ranks of PDF, HTML and ODF among the ranks of open document formats.

Experton Group believes HP, Microsoft, and SAP are sorting through their software strategies, as they prepare for their aggressive pushes into this year's market place. Executives can expect all the major software vendors to be looking to make strides this year by taking market share from others through enterprise suites rather than through point solutions. IT executives will need to sort through the offerings carefully to see which ones really satisfy company requirements versus those that offer nice additional features but are not yet up to the company's demands. Executives should take a long range view of their road maps and strategies to make sure they know which ones will integrate with their software requirements and will need less retooling to be mainstream to corporate needs.